Someday, Someday, Maybe: A Novel

From Lauren Graham, the beloved star of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood, comes a witty, charming, and hilariously relatable debut novel about a struggling young actress trying to get ahead - and keep it together - in New York City. It’s January 1995, and Franny Banks has just six months left of the three-year deadline she set for herself when she came to New York, dreaming of Broadway and doing "important" work. But all she has to show for her efforts so far is a part in an ad for ugly Christmas sweaters, and a gig waiting tables at a comedy club....

This Is How You Lose Her

The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through - "the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying" - to try to mend what we've broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care.

Fates and Furies: A Novel

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of 24 years.

Today Will Be Different

Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action - life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office - but not Eleanor - that he's on vacation.

Saint Mazie: A Novel

Meet Mazie Phillips: big hearted and bawdy, she's the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater. It's the Jazz Age, with romance and booze aplenty - even when Prohibition kicks in - and Mazie never turns down a night on the town. But her high spirits mask a childhood rooted in poverty, and her diary, always close at hand, holds her dearest secrets.

Just Kids

Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.

A Little Life: A Novel

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

Truly Madly Guilty

In Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty takes on the foundations of our lives: marriage, sex, parenthood, and friendship. She shows how guilt can expose the fault lines in the most seemingly strong relationships, how what we don't say can be more powerful than what we do, and how sometimes it is the most innocent of moments that can do the greatest harm.

Sweetbitter: A Novel

Shot from a mundane, provincial past, Tess comes to New York in the stifling summer of 2006. Alone, knowing no one, living in a rented room in Williamsburg, she manages to land a job as a backwaiter at a celebrated downtown Manhattan restaurant. This begins the year we spend with Tess as she starts to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing, and privileged life she has chosen as well as the remorseless and luminous city around her. What follows is her education.

The Nest

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a 19-year-old waitress as his passenger.

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

In The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy mines her past for stories about her teenage years, her family, relationships, and sex and shares the experiences that have shaped who she is - a woman with the courage to bare her soul to stand up for what she believes in, all while making us laugh. Down to earth and relatable, frank and unapologetic, Amy Schumer is one of us: She relies on her sister for advice, still hangs out with her high school pals, and continues to navigate the ever-changing boundaries in love, work, and life.

Dietland

Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. She is biding her time at a job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls' magazine until she can afford weight-loss surgery. But lately she is being followed by a girl in outlandish clothes and combat boots.

Purity: A Novel

Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

Henna House

Yemen in 1920: After passage of the Orphan's Decree, any unbetrothed Jewish child left orphaned will be instantly adopted by the local Muslim community. With her parents' health failing, and no spousal prospects in sight, Adela Damari's situation looks dire until her uncle arrives from a faraway city, bringing with him a cousin and aunt who introduce Adela to the powerful rituals of henna tattooing.

Bossypants

Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey's story can be told....

My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.

All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is 12, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

Here I Am: A Novel

Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, DC, Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home - and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.

The Paris Architect

Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews. So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn't really believe in. Ultimately he can't resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces - behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe - detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.

Middlesex

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

Rose Madder

Rosie Daniels leaves her husband, Norman, after 14 years in an abusive marriage. She is determined to lose herself in a place where he won't find her. She'll worry about all the rest later. Alone in a strange city, she begins to make a new life, and good things finally start to happen. Meeting Bill is one, and getting an apartment is another. Still, it's hard for Rosie not to keep looking over her shoulder, and with good reason. Norman is a cop, with the instincts of a predator.

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Nearly a half century into being a feminist and legal pioneer, something funny happened to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The octogenarian won the Internet. Across America, people who weren't even born when Ginsburg made her name are tattooing themselves with her face, setting her famously searing dissents to music, and making viral videos in tribute.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers scored a worldwide phenomenon with this memoir that topped national best-seller lists and has since become a staple for summer reading and book clubs. A compelling voice for Generation X, Eggers hererecounts his early 20s, caring for his younger brother after their parents’ unexpected deaths and his endeavors in a variety of media.

Publisher's Summary

For more than 30 years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food - thinking about it, eating it - and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live.

When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle - a whippet thin perfectionist - is intent on saving her mother-in-law's life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children's spectacular b'nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie's devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone? Or are others at fault, too?

With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.

Wonderful story but it was embarrassing to hear Molly Ringwald mispronounce the Jewish words (e.g. "meshugah, b'nai mitzvah, dayenu...") It took away from the book's authenticity. I am surprised the author, director and producer didn't consider those as necessary edits. Her tone was also very flat and I felt that it did a disservice to what was a great story.

I heard this book reviewed on NPR and was happy to see that it was available on Audible. The NPR review mentioned Attenberg's unflinchingly honest character portrayals and that piqued my interest. During several of the first chapters, I wasn't sure if I really liked the book, or if I was easily delighted by the amazingly accurate portrayal of life on the North side of the Chicago metro area. I'm originally from there, and the detail the author paints on that setting is so realistic, I felt like I was home for the holidays.

But as I got to the end of the book, I can confirm that it was the story in its entirety that charmed me. To be sure, I was left wanting so much more. It felt like it ended too soon, I wanted to know so much more about the characters past and present. That is bad news for me, but a credit to the author. Speaking of credits, I usually download really long tomes to get my credit worth in Audible, so this was an usually short book for me.

Ringwald did a nice job narrating. She was a little bit stilted at times, but it did not interfere with my enjoyment of this book and the sound of her voice likely contributed to the overall nostalgia I experienced visiting Superdogs on Milwaukee, Wicker Park, and Polish nail salons in Skokie.

Having struggled with weight and also being Jewish, allowed me to really identify with the book. I too remember the Weight Watcher "tips" like removing the center piece of bread from a Big Mac to save calories. I too have been to many Bar/Bar Mitzvah's where the elaborate affair overshadowed what the Bar Mitzvah ceremony was all about. I too know of many dysfunctional families, as a matter of fact, I don't know too many who aren't. With all this identifying, I still couldn't really make a connection to the characters in Attenberg's book. The closest I came was to the protagonist Edie, the one who was eating herself to death. But Edie is an extreme case. Even being diabetic, having to go through surgery after surgery, having her husband Richard leave her, having her children and grandchildren look at her with pity and repulsion, did not deter Edie from even one dish of Chinese food. Edie had an addiction and she just couldn't stop. At times I felt a little nauseous "watching" her eat. There was a moral to the story though, you can't help someone who doesn't want to to be helped. Even though the book hit a nerve, I didn't love the black comedy, I barely liked it.Molly Ringwald did an average narration, maybe if I had read this one instead of listening I would have liked it better.

This well written book isn't for everyone. Not one character is likeable, but the writing is very good and kept me listening to the whole story. Molly Ringwald is an awful reader for this book. All of the Yiddish words, or Jewish expressions, were mispronounced. The rest of the reading was flat.

Not a Jewish American literary masterpiece like Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth nor does it contain the wit of Jewish comedic geniuses such as Woody Allen or Seinfeld, but a still, a good listen. I was moved by the realistic characters in the audio with all their flaws and imperfections. Each character is lovable perhaps because each could rise above their individual condition of being imperfect. I didn’t find this audiobook funny. It’s depressing. I chuckled but barely a few times throughout. So if you are looking for a good laugh, laugh elsewhere. I wouldn’t pass it up though. If you’re a Jewish woman as I am you’ll relate. If addiction runs rampant in your family you will relate. If you’ve witnessed or experienced betrayal or its opposite, loyalty and love, you will relate.

I expected a lot more from this book since it got a lot of attention when it was released, but it was an enjoyable listen. Molly Ringwald does an OK job with the narration. Overall, it was a solid 3.5 stars for me.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

This book was good. It wasn't great. The story was interesting and entertaining, but never went deep enough. Perhaps that's the point--maybe there's no "there" there with the Middlestein family. They tend to live on the surface, and that's exactly where this narrative stays.

Would you be willing to try another book from Jami Attenberg? Why or why not?

Yes, I liked Attenberg's use of modern America's fixations to tell her story--she references iPods, The Black Eyed Peas, So You Think You Can Dance, etc. without sounding frivolous. I would hope she goes more in depth with the characters of her other works.

How could the performance have been better?

Yes. I'm a fan of Molly Ringwald's 80s movie career, but her narration left a lot to be desired. The accents she does are cringe-worthy at times.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Yes. This book would actually make a good film. I bet it's being optioned as we speak.

I was so excited about this book, reading the pre-publication praise and summaries. However, once I finished it, I was left wanting more, specifically more insight into the characters. I thought the brief explanation of Edie's childhood where her mom fed her to comfort her was too facile and reductionist as an explanation for her later obesity. It didn't do justice to her as a character to reduce her complete self-destruction through food in that way. She was the most interesting and engaging part of the book, but, like the other charaters, not very well developed. I felt the promise of the book (a comprehensive portrait of a family) was not fullfilled. It was more like a sketch of a family.

The review says "pitch perfect prose, huge compassion & sly humor" - I did not find these qualities in the book and found it largely depressing but for a moment or two of compassion ... forget about humor; sly or otherwise

I am giving this book a "3" because it is so readable and relatable. However, I must say that I found myself aligning with Richard, the anti-hero in this match-up. Or not? Yes, Edie is sadly victimized, but her corpulent prison and resultant dysfunction are of her own making, and could have been fixed with some good therapy or 12-Step, Weight Watcher's, or gastric bypass, which (sigh) was not even mentioned.

Yes, I can suspend disbelief, even tolerate the retrograde technology which precluded giving a nod to bariatric surgery. It did bother me, though, but I know that with successful gastric bypass there would not even be a story. Or at least not such a polarized one anyway. Edie could have had the surgery but failed in adjusting her eating habits to accommodate and thus her issues would have persisted and she would have continued to drive Richard terminally nuts. But the surgery would have surely fixed her diabetes.

Doesn't matter, there were some terrific story lines and some excellent dialogue, so why complain, and why should it even matter that the book is just not at the depth of a Franzen ("The Corrections") or a Tropper ("One Last Thing Before I Go")? I use audiobooks to a large extent for multitasking, and some of the gentler ones as sleep aids and for me this book sufficed nicely.